"Your old salad that went bad in the bag. Dump that in there," he said.

He knows one lady who keeps her vermicompost under the kitchen sink, like a living garbage disposal.

Take the castings and spread them on your plants, Price tells the curious.

"You are concentrating the nutrients," he said. "If you want to perk a plant up quick, spray a good fertilizer on its leaves."

Worm castings have become a growing business as people look to rely less on chemicals for their gardens.

"We're getting a good bit of interest from small home gardeners who want to grow a nice tasty vegetable."

Price keeps around 8,000 worms in his basement, and will sell castings to anyone from the gardener with a small patch, to the farmer who needs enough to fertilize hundreds of acres of crops. He uses a distributor who specializes in worm manure.

"Gimme a week and I can have a tractor-trailer load."

And on occasion, he'll pick up an early morning phone call from a fisherman.

"You sell worms?"

"Yes, I have worms," he admits without hesitation.

He pulls out his scale and plops a handful of red wigglers down like he's weighing a pound of grapes, and meets them at the door of his home on Palaside Drive N.E., Concord..

Like his days as a computer programmer, he still comes across a bad worm. Like the tomato hornworm he found munching on his heirlooms this year.

Ever the recycler, Price nipped the issue like one would expect.

"I broke the leaf off and put it in the bird feeder," he said. "That takes care of that problem."